Embassy of Food
Our food system, and the current way of consuming it, is in dire need of change. However, the question of how to go about this has been bogged down for some time now. Designers can play a role in changing the way we look at this and in shaping the world behind our food and the relationship we have with it better and differently. The Embassy of Food wants to bring together imagination and reality by being a place where, in addition to designers, people from the entire food chain come together to experiment with each other; from farmer to scientist and from policy officer to supermarket manager. So, with design power and in meaningful collaborations in this in-between space, we will look for the answer to the question: how can we take a fresh look at the sticking points and thereby reshape the current food system?
The Embassy of Food is tackling this issue in a three-pronged approach. In 2023, The Farm of Tomorrow already explored what values people consider important when making choices about food. In 2024 we will use these new ‘food values’ to design revised food relationships. The Disc of Five to Twelve takes our relationship to our food as the starting point for how we should eat. Our relationship to soil, the space that growing food takes up, the time it takes, and the effects on humans and nature are all translated into new scenarios. Thus, together, we sketch a new future perspective in which we can feel good about our relationship with our food.
In 2025 we will then extend this line to scale. Because in order to feed the Netherlands, or even the world, and keep it healthy, we must learn to think in terms of volume. This means that we have to think beyond what works on an individual level. To do so, we need to become big in small scale, or small in large scale. In other words: we have to turn the volume upside down! In 2025, we will therefore literally map the Dutch food landscape and design a proposal on how we can redesign the Netherlands food landscape based on these insights; from shelf to landscape.